Seat

Like on my last project (CB750F), I decided to make my own seat. Unlike on the CB though, this time I had to craft my own seat pan. (on the CB, I used a spare pan off a KLR250, which I modified to fit my application)

So, armed with a can of resin, some masking tape, fiberglass cloth and mat sheets, and an old seat that I wanted to use for its foam, I set to work.

After masking the frame and laying down some cardboard to fill the gaps, I laid my first two coats of resin and cloth. The seat pan follows the contours of the frame, which, if you know a CX500, is not the friendliest of shapes. When the initial resin and cloth had cured, I took it off the frame, trimmed excess with a cutting wheel, and stapled the pan to a wooden board to have a study work platform. I then sanded the pan with coarse sandpaper, and laid down three layers of fiberglass mat to provide structural integrity. Here is the resulting pan (sturdy enough to hold my ass in place without any flexing).

Next to the pan, you can see the old seat foam I planned to use. Clearly, the shape was all wrong (but the foam was the right kind). I ended up tracing the seat pan onto the underside of the foam, then hacking away all the unnecessary foam with a razor blade. When the underside shape was close enough, I sprayed it with upholstery adhesive, and clamped the foam in place while the glue set.

A few days later, I hacked away all I could with a metal saw blade, then proceeded to make the final adjustments with a belt sander. For me, nothing works better than a belt sander for foam shaping. With the right grit paper, and just the right amount of pressure, tiny parts of foam just fly off, leaving behind a smooth, workable surface. Once that was done, I had a shape that makes for a solid, comfortable seat (IMHO).

Unlike the KLR250 pan, which was made of nylon, stapling the vinyl cover to the fiberglass is not an option. I have some aluminum rivets I could use, but I'm not sure yet how that would work, given the inability to simple pull the material off for repositioning. So, there lies my next challenge.

In the mean time, I continued working on painting the tank, plastics, and tail section. After shooting these with a silver base paint, I taped off what I did not want covered, and painted the silver over with a red candy paint. The tank was then shot with 4 coats of urethane clear. Here it is curing before final wetsanding and buffing. The other three parts were not cleared yet, but I'm hoping I'll be done with painting this week. The candy does not really show well with a flash, but it looks great in the sunlight.